It has been a strange month. We have had a holiday in which the entire family slept in one room for a fortnight - and yet we had a terrific time. I even pulled my weight. I don't get it. However, I have just endured the most gruelling experience of the summer: a game of Top Trumps, played with my youngest, in order to pass the time. Time spent playing Top Trumps does not pass, though, in the usual manner. I think it's some material they use in the cards. Or it may be due to the nature of the game itself.

Those of you who are familiar with it will know well what I mean. For those who do not, I will say only that the two-player version involves reading statistics off cards and then either handing one over to the other player, or receiving one in turn. The one who claims all the other player's cards wins the game. As chance plays a large part, it can theoretically go on forever, and indeed, a sports cars Top Trumps game started in 1977, the year of the game's invention, is still going on between Brian "Basher" Suggs and Andrew "Snotface" Holmes of Kidderminster, even though they have long since left school, abandoned their nicknames (apart from poor Snotface) and brought up families, who have come to accept the situation as normal.

As it happened, my six-year-old found the game wearisome after a few hours, even though it was the Ashes 2005 Top Trumps set, which I must remember to give my last remaining Australian friends for Christmas. (Hmm. Better give it to them early, the next series is in November.) The game felt longer than a few hours, though, particularly as, for once in my life, I was desperately trying to lose in a competitive contest between me and my offspring. It felt more like two weeks, and to my surprise, I found I had emerged from the game with a rather striking beard.

To have joined the ranks of the bearded is in itself a very strange feeling, but probably to be written about elsewhere. What matters in these pages is how it changes one's relationships with the children. Children are naturally conservative - their lives flit by so fast - and radical change can freak them out. And short of growing an extra leg or having a sex change, I can't think of many more radical changes to one's appearance than growing a beard. Especially if it happens during an unusually protracted game of Top Trumps.

The youngest, therefore, was the most startled by this new development. The beard is unpopular with him, and he is the one who makes me feel the most awkward with the thing, like Bertie Wooster quavering under the stern scrutiny of a disapproving Jeeves. Surprisingly, though, the other children think it is rather amusing, and while they do not go so far as to attribute to me the wisdom of Merlin or Gandalf, they at least don't call me a smelly old tramp (which is, I have to admit, the closest visual analogue to my new appearance).

But it is authority I am after, and if I can't get it by the traditional means - supreme competence, trustworthiness, patience, justice and kindness - then the shortcut is a beard. It also represents the ideal expression of this column's philosophy. How could Slack Dad call himself truly Slack if he went around shaving almost every day?

The strange thing is, it seems to work. A rigorously scientific study at Slack Towers has determined that in a control group of two Slack Dads, one bearded and the other not, instructions given by the shaven Slack Dad were ignored 98% of the time, whereas instructions given by the beardy Slack Dad were ignored a mere 97% of the time. Of course, there is a 1% margin of error, but personally speaking I think the results are pretty conclusive.

So now that all the dilemmas of fatherhood have been solved in the five years or so that I have been writing this column, it is time to take a little rest. The adventure continues on the website (www.slackdad.com), but I can't add to it myself until my brother gets back from holiday. My thanks to all who have written to support my modest struggle for the peaceable father who loves his children, but also appreciates his time off.